Germany is at it again

This time it's the prosecutor from Mannheim. This time they're censoring
neo-Nazi material by a German expatriate living in Canada. Again the censorship
is being applied with a heavy hand; this time millions of German
Internet users are being denied access to hundreds or thousands of innocuous
information sources hosted from a site in California. (See
TBTF for 1996-01-22
for a related story.)

Ernst Zundel (also spelled Zuendel) is a visible online proponent of the
theory that the Holocaust did not happen. Espousing such views, or possessing
material furthering such views (the German word is "Volksverhetzung",
or "inciting material"), is a crime in Germany. The prosecutor for Mannheim
is investigating whether, since such materials were available to Germans
from Zundel's Web site hosted in Santa Cruz, all of Germany was a
crime scene. The prosecutor spoke to representatives of Compuserve and of
T-Online, the online service run by Deutsche Telekom. These organizations
are the only large-scale Internet providers in Germany. Compuserve says
they were not pressured or urged to take any particular action. T-Online,
however, decided to block all network packets originating at Zundel's
host site (www.webcom.com) from entering Germany. This action cut off
all T-Online subscribers from all the resources at Webcom, which include
the commercial and personal pages of 1500 businesses and individuals.

Free-speech advocate Declan McCullagh <declan at well dot com> does not endorse
Zundel's views, but he has nonetheless gone to some lengths to demonstrate
to the Mannheim prosecutor the futility of trying to censor speech on the
Internet. He has mirrored Zundel's Web site to computers housed at Stanford,
Carnegie Mellon University, MIT -- in effect daring the German authorities
to cripple German research by shutting off access to these universities.
Others have used his "Zundelsite kit" to scatter mirrors across the Internet.
A downside to this up-the-ante tactic is the increased visibility it lends
to this extremely offensive material, and McCullagh's actions seem to have
made other free-speech advocates uneasy.

Thomas Roessler <Thomas.Roessler at sobolev dot rhein dot de> writes from Germany that
after talking with a spokesman in the Mannheim prosecutor's office he believes
the prosecutor received a tip explicitly mentioning Zundel, Compuserve
and T-Online; the official then had no choice but to investigate. The
German courts have not clarified the question of whether it is a crime to
act as a blind carrier of illegal information. The Cypherpunks list specuates
that the person who tipped the prosecutor may have been a free-speech
advocate hoping to provoke a court test of just this question.

News stories over the last several days indicate that both France and South
Africa are considering censoring neo-Nazi material on the Internet.

France tries to ban a book

Dr. Claude Gubler, long-time physician of Francois Mitterand, published a
book titled "Le Grand Secret" days after Mitterand's funeral. Dr. Gubler
reveals that Mitterand suffered from cancer for the last 11 years of his
life but kept the fact a secret. The book sold out in bookstores on the day
of publication; the next day it was banned by the French government because
Mitterand's widow and illegitimate daughter complained that it violated their
privacy. Pascal Barbraud, the owner of a cyber-cafe in the town of Besangon,
scanned all 190 pages of the book and made them available (as 190 .gif files,
9 MB in total) on the cafe's Web site. Thousands of visitors downloaded the
images. Within 5 days the images had been run through optical character recognition
software and the book's full text (in French) had been posted to
alt.censorship and was available at several sites in HTML form (at 72 KB).
See for example <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/declan/www/le-secret/>.

Netscape 2.0 to ship without Java support on Macintosh

Those of us with some investment in Apple -- technological or financial or
emotional -- have had a rough few weeks. The company lost $69M in what should
have been its strongest quarter, announced the layoff of 1,300, and struggled
to stay afloat in a swirl of rumors predicting its imminent merger with a
variety of white knights. (At least no one has so far launched a hostile
bid.) The suitor most reliably reported is Sun Microsystems. The rumored
talks have broken off apparently because the sides were too far apart on
price. Sun's stock price has risen since then and Apple's has dropped. MacUser
magazine has posted an excellent survey of Apple's troubles and prospects
at <http://www.zdnet.com/%7Emacuser/applefuture/>.

High on the list of news that Apple didn't need in the midst of this turmoil
was word that Mac Netscape 2.0 will probably go "golden" without support for
Java. Netscape's Marc Andreesen confirmed the rumor in a message that Dave
Winer, the legendary Mac programmer, posted on his popular DaveWorld site --
see <http://www.hotwired.com/staff/userland/itstwueitstwue_476.html>. Andreessen
said that the delay was caused by the unexpected difficulty of the Mac
port and an early shortage of experienced Mac programmers on the project. He
says that Mac Java will ship as soon as possible, "hopefully within the next
couple of months." Meanwhile Winer, a longtime and passionate Mac proponent,
has set up a Windows NT system next to his PowerMac 8100.

Even without this delay Netscape has already been scooped at providing the
first Java runtime on the Mac platform. At MacWorld Expo, Natural Intelligence
announced availability of Roaster 1.0 for the Power Macintosh, a development
environment for Java applets; it caused the hottest buzz at the show.
(See <http://www.natural.com/>.) Symantec <http://www.symantec.com/> will ship
its Java environment in the first quarter -- the product introduced as "Latte"
but now to be called "Symantec Cafe for Java" because of a trademark conflict.
Pity, that.

Et tu, states?

The _ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update_ for 1996-01-24 reports that while online
activists have been fighting the Communications Decency Act still pending
at the federal level, nearly twenty states have considered legislation to
censor the Internet. Eight states have already passed such legislation:
Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Oklahoma, and
Virginia. In addition bills are actively pending in California, North Carolina
and Pennsylvania. Even New York and Washington, traditionally hotbeds
of both first-amendment sentiment and online/computer industry, have introduced
censorship legislation. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times for
1996-01-24, J. Walker Smith of Yankelovich Partners argues against protection
of privacy rights and on the side of Internet restrictions. His firm conducted
surveys in which large majorities of U.S respondents rated issues
of crime and security in Cyberspace ahead of concerns about the erosion of
privacy in the new medium.

Neither flame nor spam nor storm of Net

The US Postal Service wants to move into the electronic world. It's planing
a hybrid service carrying both paper mail and e-mail, electronic shopping
kiosks, and certified electronic mail, to roll out over the next few years.
Meanwhile here's a service you can use today to reduce postage expenses
and delays when writing to destinations in Europe. A UK company called
PaperMail <info at papermail dot win-uk dot net> will accept email and send out snail
mail for a faction of the cost of sending a letter from the US or other
parts of the world. Mail should be delivered the next day within Britain
and within a few days to the rest of Europe. (PaperMill does not seem to
have a Web site; for more information email them at the address above.)

Starting in 1996 TBTF moves from a twice-weekly to a weekly schedule. Those
of you who have followed TBTF from its beginnings have seen it evolve from a
thrice-weekly collection of clippings with occasional commentary to a meatier
and I hope more thoughtful and thought-provoking dispatch. I'm not operating
under any master plan here, I'm giving TBTF its head and seeing where it leads.
Enjoying the ride, myself, and I hope you are too. Let me hear from you.

TBTF alerts you weekly to bellwethers in computer and communications technol-
ogy, with special attention to commerce on the Internet. See the archive at
<http://www.tbtf.com/>. To subscribe send the message "subscribe"
to tbtf-request@world.std.com. Commercial use prohibited. For non-commercial
purposes please forward and post as you see fit.
______________________________________________________
Keith Dawson dawson dot tbtf at gmail dot com dawson@atria.com
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.